Friday 29 July 2005

Shooting to kill needs no warning

UPDATE, THE SECOND: Now our glorious police have killed a Grandmother, accidentally of course but that's what you get when you MANHANDLE A 74 YEAR OLD WOMAN. Two women and a 12 year old boy harrassed by police to the extent that one of them dies. Has our constabulary lost all sense of reason? How the hell could they think that these people were a threat? What the FUCK is happening to this country? Has everyone gone stark-staring bonkers???

UPDATE: They just shot someone else. Would everybody STOP getting shot!

This is just great, the controls of the fascist police state are complete. You can now get shot for being suspected of being a suicide bomber. We have one innocent Brazillian dead and now many more could be shot for no reason whatsoever. This government is totally out of control, am I the only one who can see that? This is no longer a democracy, this is a police state where you can be shot for wearing a big jacket and sprinting for the train.

But then our police were trained in Israel so what the hell do you expect!?


Police have been given permission to shoot dead suspected suicide bombers without any verbal warning, the Guardian has learned.

The killing of an innocent Brazilian man in a London underground station on Friday has focused attention on new guidelines to defend against terror attacks.

Operation Kratos tactics say suicide bombers who are about to explode their devices can be shot in the head.

There is still confusion over whether Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot eight times, received a verbal warning.

A police source has told the Guardian that there is no need for officers to verbally warn a suspect before opening fire.

The source said: "If the firearms team are reasonably certain the person is a suicide bomber then there is no need to issue any warning.

"Experience from other parts of the world shows that if a suicide bomber knows they are being followed by police, they will detonate."

Yesterday, Barbara Wilding, the chief constable of South Wales police and one of the architects of the shoot-to-kill policy, said old guidelines telling officers to fire at the upper chest were redundant in the face of the dangers posed by suicide bombers.

She told the BBC that criminal law still governed officers' actions: "We always have to be able to answer, have we used reasonable force in the light of intelligence of the situation and the risk?"

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said there had been 250 incidents since the attacks when police thought they may have been dealing with a suicide bomber. And he indicated that on seven occasions police had been on the brink of acting.

"I know there have been 250 incidents since July 7 where we have considered whether we are seeing a suicide bomber," he said. "I know that when I last saw it there had been seven times when we have got as close to calling it as 'that' and we haven't."

Full story...